Inwiefern ist die Erkenntnis eines Menschen, der nicht versöhnt ist mit Gott, verschieden von der Erkenntnis eines versöhnten Menschen? John Frame:
- All unbelievers know enough truths about God to be without excuse and may know many more, as many as are available to man. There is no limit to the number of true, revealed propositions about God that an unbeliever can know.
- But unbelievers lack the obedience and friendship with God that is essential to ‘knowledge’ in the fullest biblical sense – the knowledge of the believer. Yet at every moment, they are personally involved with God as an enemy.
- The unbeliever’s disobedience has intellectual implications:
It is a stupid response to God’s revelation.
Disobedience is a kind of lying. We testify to others and to ourselves that God’s Word is untrue.
Disobedience involves fighting the truth: They deny it, ignore it, psychologically repress it, acknowledge the truth with the lips but deny it in deed, put the truth into a misleading context and use the truth to oppose God.
Lying and fighting the truth involve affirmations of falsehoods.
These falsehoods may conflict with the true beliefs that the sinner holds.
These falsehoods affect every area of life, including the epistemological.
For the unbeliever the lie is dominant over the truth.
The unbeliever’s goal is an impossible one – to destroy the truth entirely, to replace God with some alternative deity. This task is self-frustrating.
John Frame. The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. P & R: Philippsburg 1987. (59-60)
Siehe auch
- Wie offenbart sich Gott ausnahmslos allen Menschen?
- Wie weit ist Verstand und Wille des natürlichen Menschen durch die Sünde beeinträchtigt worden? (erster Post einer fünfteiligen Serie)
